OBSERVATIONS / RECOLLECTIONS / STORIES

From Abbottabad to Zimbabwe

According to students of comedy, the funniest sounds in the English language are the plosive consonants.

I’d never heard of a plosive, either, so I looked it up. Plosives are sounds that start suddenly with a burst of air — the letters b, d, g, k, and p.

In the play The Sunshine Boys, one of Neil Simon’s cantankerous characters went a step further and specifically praised words with a “k” in them…

Fifty-seven years in this business, you learn a few things. You know what words are funny and which words are not funny. ‘Alka-Seltzer’ is funny. You say ‘Alka-Seltzer,’ you get a laugh. Words with ‘k’ in them are funny.